I’d left my job to go to rehab, so when my three months in the treatment centre came to an end, I found myself unemployed again. I was treating my sobriety with great care, as if I was a delicate, newly hatched chick and I was not going to let myself be shaken or squashed. I was trying to pay attention to my needs and emotions, anxious, tired, lonely, hungry, which previously I’d usually dealt with by an unsubtle and ultimately unhelpful application of booze. I was going to AA meetings and avoiding some old places and people, while applying for jobs with a new hard-to-explain gap in my CV.
